Books: Minerva's Mother

Simone de Beauvoir's meticulous scholarship of her own psychology has
made her a formidable, if exasperating, novelist and autobiographer. In
both forms she has displayed an intransigent hostility toward the
values of her own familyCatholic, provincial, bourgeois. She has
celebrated an escape into atheism, Paris and existentialism, and she
has strewn a great deal of philosophical confetti over her famous
non-wedding with Jean-Paul Sartre, her unembarrassable non-bridegroom.
Now, this brilliant, honest, but Gallically humorless woman, who in The
Second Sex denied...